Musings on Happiness

This isn't new, I actually just found this while I was looking for something else on my hard drive, but I thought it was worth posting.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sometimes we try too hard to have all the right answers. The pain and grief associated with the unexpected often comes from our own inability to accept that sometimes, we just don’t know. When unexpected crops up, we often have a habit of criticizing our lack of foresight or our mistakes. What we seem to be forgetting however is that it is these unexpected moments, these changes in the winds direction, that allow us to really heal from the things that bind us to the past and follow us in the present. It takes time to acknowledge and embrace moments of change but eventually, everything does. Eventually, everything you know and love and rely upon right now will change, grow, die or disappear. There is no certainty and there is no foresight when it comes to the utter complicated mess of existence.

If someone was to have said to me at thirteen, this is what your life will look like I would have been extremely disappointed. What I am trying to illustrate here is not that I feel that my life lacks something today, but about the expectations one has and how they constrict the capacity we have to be happy. Under my thirteen year old guidelines I could have and would have only been happy in a very specific set of circumstances., This idealism, this sense of right and wrong about how your life is 'supposed' to look worked to construct my interpretations my own happiness. How could I possibly be happy, if my life isn't exactly what it is supposed to be?

Its amazing then, that we even find any happiness at all, with the plethora of insane and impractical expectations and ideals floating around our minds. Constantly comparing this current reality with the one created in our imagination. Well, I think if I were to be completely honest I would have to admit that all those thoughts -the ideas and dreams of what does or doesn’t make me happy- change. They change and have been changing all along. They are in every way transient and unpredictable. As I reach back through my memories trying to coagulate some kind of meaningful consistency, I find none. If I am really honest what I remember loving the most as a child was drawing or crafts. Glitter and glues, mulch-coloured pens and a world of possibility. Then dance, merely by happenstance then somewhere in there writing, poetry, philosophy, academics, business, law, religion, marriage, children, materialism, travel. . . All these things and more crossed and crisscrossed my emotional and intellectual conceptions of what I thought would make me happy. And you know what? It is only in this moment of disillusionment, for all the things I have ever held dear, that I realize just how impractical these ‘ideas’ of what makes me happy really are.

I have lost time being miserable. I have lost beautiful, precious time wasting my thoughts and my feelings on how ‘incomplete’ my life is without one thing or another. If I had just had more stable parents, more money, more time, more freedom. The hours whittle away beside my failure to meet my own demands. The things that hurt will always hurt. Change will still come as a surprise and will still cause me to question my ability to govern my own life. I don’t know that I won’t look back through the past and try and divine some meaning . Still try to find some kind of linear evolution leading upwards towards. . . well anything. But I can’t hang on anymore to the belief that I know what happiness means, or that I am able to facilitate change in its favour.